God Should Have Known Better!

| Higio ZARNGAM |
Whosoever said
looks don’t
matter! They do, or at least the recent controversy surrounding the breadth and width of the eyes would make one believe so. With so much of that in the news recently, one can almost forgive a person for thinking that there is an eye measuring scale to assess the severity of the crime against them.
The country and the capital, in particular, have been mired by racial controversies in the recent past. The Delhi Police statistics show that one person from the Northeast faces harassment in the capital every alternate day. The numbers are appalling; which means that while there are extreme cases of students being murdered or beaten to death, there is an even greater number of people being bullied for a ‘crime’ they were born with. The fact that people are being bracketed and marginalized for something they had no control over, is reason enough to worry.
The Nido Tania case earlier in February grabbed the eyeballs of the nation. The oohs and aahs could be heard on television every night. Until of course, another sensational news fought its way to the headline. Though we do have to thank the people here for helping us claw back to the prime time and how. A feeling of déjà vu returns on seeing yet another attack. People have short memory, so the ‘attack every alternate day’ statistics let the otherwise media deprived Northeast actually be in the limelight. The silver lining, you see!
However, there exists a section of society who challenge the racial view on the attacks on Northeast people; their claim being that not all such attacks need to have race as its underlying tone. How do we then classify which attacks are racial and which are not? It is true that every situation is different. There are instances of arguments being started over some personal problem and not necessarily race. The problem however, starts when the argument that might have started on a different subject takes a racial turn with racial slurs being hurled at each other, when one’s physical trait dominates the argument rather than personality traits.
All said and done, this is certainly not a case of rotten potatoes. The yin and yang of society exists.
If God did create this world only for people who looked like a certain way, s/he would have surely put us with ‘lesser eye’ in a world other than the one we inhabit. That should have guaranteed world peace for sure. Alas, there was but one world to put all the mortals in. And we have now been left with to deal with this harsh reality; of tolerating people who look different from us and worse, try to adjust with them. God should have known better, I tell you!
(The writer is OSD, IPR, Arunachal Bhawan, New Delhi.)